Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Creator Chanelle Howell connected the AI to her Instagram saved folders; in about 45 seconds it generated a 4-day Barcelona & Mallorca itinerary from her aesthetic preferences, shown as a phone webpage with Day 1 in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter, specific restaurants (Los Caracoles, churros at Masia de Sabor, Tapeo), clickable links, opening hours, and booking options.
He had black mold in his home and no idea what to buy. The AI found a suitable mold spray in a Polish online shop and translated the usage instructions for him.
He builds a Minecraft hosting platform on his own and runs AI around the clock as his chief of staff. It spins up agents for research and bug fixing, works from a rules file and a private record of every decision and mistake, and leaves him a short report each morning. Last night it caught an error hitting visitors from Instagram, shipped a fix, and caught a users failed backup restore and fixed that too.
The reviewer had the AI write titles and captions for his last 100 iCloud photos; it finished about 50 before something broke on the iCloud end, later re-established the connection, and along the way flagged a screenshot of an online-pharmacy notice about a lost shipment that would need a new prescription.
A man bought a used piece of industrial machinery and the $1,500 control software did not come with it. With no coding experience at all, he asked the AI on the web to build a control app, and in under an hour he had a working app packaged as a .deb file for Linux. It cost him nothing because he used his brother's AI subscription.
Creator took on a $30/week family-of-4 budget challenge with AI, asking it to start from what she already had in her pantry. The AI produced 7 dinner ideas, a grocery list, and a price comparison; her Walmart haul came to $29.66, under budget.
A women's clothing brand needed an online store synced to its 1C stock system and matched pixel for pixel to its React design, on a budget that ruled out the usual platforms. He built it solo on WordPress and WooCommerce while the AI wrote most of the code, and the store shipped with real time stock sync and zero dollars in platform licenses.
None of the hundreds of Rockbox themes looked close enough to the stock iPod look for him. He asked the AI to build one based on a 2011 theme, and the result, Classic Revival, is now up on the Rockbox themes site for anyone with an iPod Video to download.
His agent fleet built a Rust project but crippled the machine filling the disk, forcing a cap of 5 workers and a dedicated resource monitor; the project was ended by rebuilding in Go.
Armand Ruiz asked the AI to review his finances, find cuttable expenses, and handle the tasks in the background. The AI recovered $2,120.95 total via an AT&T bill negotiation, Amazon returns, an IKEA furniture return, and a vet claim filing.
Fable managing many Opus agents built a playable 3D RTS like StarCraft 2 with 3 races, 40+ units and 40+ buildings in 3 days.
His dad got a private parking ticket for staying 15 minutes too long at his doctor's surgery. The AI drafted the POPLA appeal, it cited the Equalities Act, and his dad saved £100.
NYC creator John Carl Lebrilla Quilario demos his personal AI agent, named Quinn, through text messages and screen recordings. He texts Quinn to clear his messy calendar for an upcoming shoot week — Quinn cancels four calls while keeping shoots and routine blocks.
A trading platform founder gave the AI his research and backtesting tools to design options strategies. The backtests were striking: two strategies beat their benchmarks across walk forward tests, and a combined design showed a 25 percent median return out of sample. The live money tells a soberer story. As of October 16 his original $25,000 account stands at $26,746.61, up 6.99 percent after giving back much of an early 26.58 percent run, and the newer $13,500 account is at $12,904.45, down 4.41 percent. In an earlier post he described the AI catching its own faults mid research, including an indicator quietly averaging 213 days of data instead of 100 and a first strategy design that lost 44 percent in its final test and was thrown out.
Opus 5.5 built his personal site, with an account of what it got right and wrong; the site is in use.
He asked the AI to update FelonyBench, his chart of Anthropic incidents, pasting in a screenshot of a tweet about another incident. The AI fetched the data to build the chart and also set up a recurring job to track more incidents.
He built a setup that links the AI with Photoshop to handle a work task that is too fiddly to call simple. When a request came in from a client, the setup did the work and he delivered it so fast the client said they had expected it to take about 2 weeks.
The New York Times' own Daily podcast episode on Tan's two-week the AI test (Oct 6, 2026) summarizes: 'the AI, Meta's A.I. agent, helped a Times reporter with dental insurance, dinner reservations and more.' Dinner reservations were among the delegated real-world tasks in the review.
The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.
Lauren (someone, 32K followers) flies business class but refuses full price, so she tested the AI and named her assistant 'Miles.' On-screen chat showed Miles quoting a ~$3,750 baseline and confirming it would monitor for three months; statuses cycled through 'Tracking fares' and 'Searching fares.' Later a phone notification showed Miles's 'Good morning!' briefing listing five Icelandair fares under $2k from SEA and SFO to Rome. B-roll showed her on a business-class flight.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.